It's possible to tell why this is one of Lem's best-loved
novels, but an English-language reader must get past the choppy,
sometimes hard-to-parse prose of the translation, which is a double
translation via French. (Many have complained about the puzzling
low rating I gave this novel, which is often cited as Lem's
masterpiece; it's the translation's fault.) Reportedly the French
translation is quite good; I'd like to obtain a copy of it
someday.
Solaris is a planet covered with a mysterious ocean that seems
to be a single living organism. Kris Kelvin arrives at a research
station hovering above the planet's surface, in order to ascertain
whether the project should be shut down for lack of progress. He
discovers that the people on board seem to be in a deep, paranoid
funk. They are haunted by what seem to be hallucinations of people
associated with past events evoking intense personal guilt.
Quickly, Kelvin discovers that he can see them too--they're not
hallucinations, they're solid, corporeal entities. Presumably they
are generated by the thing that covers the planet; whether it is an
attempt at communication or an act of psychological warfare, nobody
can be sure.
Before long, Kelvin himself is visited by a very real, seemingly
indestructible incarnation of his dead wife, for whose suicide he
blames himself. Kelvin is torn between his desire to fend off the
planet's apparent psychological attack, and his love for his wife,
real or simulated. The crew's struggle to solve the puzzle, and
Kelvin's heartbreaking interactions with the ghost, alternate with
descriptions of incomprehensible phenomena on the planet's surface,
and satirical accounts of the history of attempts to make sense of
the living ocean.
The ending may be less than satisfying to people who demand
solid dramatic closure, but this is a moving, tragic novel with
considerable emotional power. It would be wonderful if someone
retranslated it, because English-language readers are obviously
seeing it as through a glass, darkly.
The reknowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky
adapted Solaris
into a Russian-language movie of the same name. I highly recommend
the movie; it's an absorbing work of art, though it demands a
certain amount of patience from the viewer. Much like Stanley
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey,
it's very long (3 hours) and slow-moving, but visually astonishing,
especially given that Tarkovsky didn't have access to the effects
technology available to Western filmmakers. It's also extremely
faithful to Lem's novel, much more so than most films based on
novels.
One major difference is that events happening before Kelvin's
departure for Solaris, which Lem sprinkles throughout the novel,
are shown at the beginning of the film, which means that it takes
longer to begin than the novel does. Particularly puzzling is a
scene near the beginning in which a former explorer of Solaris,
whose testimony about a childlike apparition is widely disbelieved,
takes a long, hypnotic car ride through greater Tokyo, filmed with
a wide-angle lens and jumbled sound effects in apparent homage to
the "stargate" sequence in 2001.
Once Kelvin actually gets to Solaris, though, the action hews
more or less precisely to the plot of the novel (until the last
scene, which is an ingenious improvement on Lem's ending), and the
production design stunningly recreates the grandiose decrepitude of
the station. There seem to be sets covering essentially all of the
station's interior. Tarkovsky even manages a few nice-looking
effects shots of the peculiar ocean of Solaris. The footage shifts
repeatedly between black-and-white and color to indicate mood, a
Tarkovsky trademark. The dialogue seems to be taken almost verbatim
from the novel (or as verbatim as a translation can be), but since
the English subtitles of the version I've seen are somewhat
fragmentary, and are of course a double translation via Russian,
once again Lem's prose is somewhat buried for the English-speaking
viewer.
There is one major scientific goof, probably deliberately
introduced for esthetic reasons. In one scene, the station loses
its internal gravity for some not-clearly-stated reason. The first
effect of this that we see is a flying candelabra, with the candles
burning as if nothing had happened, flames pointing upward. (Most
of the science, both in the book and the movie, doesn't bear enough
resemblance to anything known to merit this sort of criticism.)
I have recently heard that the first release of Solaris
in America was a 90-minute cut that was rendered unintelligible by
the omission of half of the movie. If that's all you've seen, by
all means check out the three-hour version.
Tarkovsky also made a movie called Stalker based on
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's fine novel Roadside
Picnic (for Lem's review of the novel, see Microworlds). Of all of
Lem's novels, actually, Solaris reminds me the most of
the Strugatskys' work. Like many of their novels, it contains
baffling, fantastic events that never quite click into a climactic
rational explanation, but rather contribute to the story via their
gradual, cumulative effects on the vividly painted characters in
the foreground, people who in some cases could not care less about
the central mystery, but just want to get on with their lives.
The 2002 American remake of Solaris starring George
Clooney, directed by Stephen Soderbergh and produced by James
Cameron, isn't bad, though I prefer Tarkovsky's version.
If you want to make Solaris more commercial, there
are basically two ways to do it. You could add action and horror
elements and make it a far schlockier movie, with rubber monsters
and an auto-destruct countdown at the end. Or, to stay more
faithful to the original text, you could sex it up and try to sell
it as a love story. That's what Soderbergh did, and it works all
right, because the acting is fine all around and the actress cast
as Kelvin's wife (Natascha McElhone; the character is named Rheya
in this version, after the English translation) has lovely eyes.
Lem's B-plot about the futile investigation of Solaris and the
frustrations of the unknowable is almost gone, as you'd likely
expect. Instead, there's more detail about Kris and Rheya's past
life together, which is a sane storytelling choice that I can't
fault in objective terms. But it's still sort of disappointing to
me. Tarkovsky didn't have the budget or the technology to film more
of the psychedelia of the surface of Solaris and the history of its
explorers. Soderbergh could have done so, but chose not to. The
planet is seen only in the distance, and looks much like SOHO
ultraviolet photos of the Sun.
Soderbergh was clearly inspired by Tarkovsky's film, more than
by Lem's novel; particularly in the flashback scenes on Earth,
which are visualized with a nice low-key futurism, he seems to be
aping Tarkovsky's visual style and use of sound. Other scenes,
particularly Kelvin's arrival at the station, are, of course, done
in a style reminiscent of Kubrick, but then Tarkovsky was doing
that to some degree as well.
The movie has flaws. It loves George Clooney way, way too much.
He's in tight closeup most of the time he appears, and when he
isn't, he's naked and the camera is focusing lovingly on his butt.
If you like George Clooney's butt, I suppose this is good.
Soderbergh also attempted to put in comic relief by turning the
character of Snouth/Snow into a young, scatterbrained 1990s slacker
type who babbles in circles; he's obnoxious. The strangeness and
occasional, surprising violence of the story are downplayed for
most of the running time; the scene in which Kelvin first tries to
get rid of the Rheya-ghost is now much lower-key and de-emphasizes
her inhumanity.
The sets are impressive (and clearly took up most of the movie's
budget that didn't go to paying Clooney), but are unlike Tarkovsky's; instead of making
the whole thing look disheveled and decrepit, this movie opts for
the Syd Mead-inspired shiny-metal look that showed up in so much
Eighties SF, all the better for contrast when somebody finds blood
smeared on the walls.
Soderbergh once again plays with the ending, this time giving it
a great big plot twist reminiscent of that in a certain popular
movie of the 1990s.
The DVD has an amusing trailer on it that attempts to sell
Solaris as an out-and-out, three-hankie chick flick
about what happens when "love is strong enough", sort of an
outer-space Ghost or What Dreams May Come
(producer Cameron's association with Titanic is cited
prominently). I can imagine people going to see it and being
disappointed that it retains enough of Lem's story to be something
quite different from that. It's been sexed up, comic-reliefed and
truncated, but it is still recognizably Solaris, and
the strangeness does shine through here and there.
Elements from Solaris keep popping up elsewhere. I
recently saw it briefly referenced in a surrealistic episode of
Futurama, a clever comic science-fiction cartoon whose
creators were obviously Lem fans (they've done episodes loosely
based on a couple of Ijon Tichy stories as well).
Some people have suggested that one of the subplots in the 1997
outer-space horror movie Event Horizon is an
adaptation or rip-off of Solaris, but Event
Horizon (about a spaceship that goes to hell and comes back
possessed by the devil) is so gut-wrenchingly stupid that it's
painful to admit any similarity. I think that Event
Horizon actually owes more to the bizarre 1979 Disney movie
The Black Hole, but that is another story.